There are no kinds of love, love is love; there are only degrees of love. Love is trusting, accepting and believing, without guarantee. Love is patient and waits, but it’s an active waiting, not a passive one. For it is continually offering itself in a mutual revealing, a mutual sharing. Love is spontaneous and craves expression through joy, through beauty, through truth, even through tears. Love lives in the moment; it’s neither lost in yesterday nor does it crave for tomorrow. Love is Now!- Leo Buscaglia, Love : What Life Is All About, page: 74

“I’m in love again, but I’m afraid!” Jasmine, a friend, revealed hesitantly as we were walking along the shore. I gave her a big hug knowing the tumultuous years of her past relationships.

My gaze hovers past the horizon reflecting about love, hearing its rustle within the whistling wind touching my senses. Our need for love is as great as the need for air or the need for food. We all need love but why are we so afraid of it?

The angry waves hurling against the shoreline gave me the answer: We are afraid of being hurt!!

Every time we give of ourselves, love requires total vulnerability. Every time we extend ourselves into vulnerability, we are risking being rejected, being turned away. I remember a quote from William Faulkner, “if I had to choose between pain and nothing, I would always chose pain.”

I agree. So what if you are jilted, you pick yourself up, you learn, and you go out to try again. No one is incapable of failure or error. The greatest lovers of the world have a lot of love scars all over. Yet, it’s okay because it doesn’t make them any tougher; they stay vulnerable. They learn and they move forward. It’s better to be hurt and alive than to be wandering around suspicious and dead, just like a zombie!

The next day, I gave Jasmine a book by one of my favorite “cheerleader for life”, Leo Buscaglia’s “Love: What Life Is All About”.

“LOVE is NOW!” I told her.

How about you, are you afraid to love?

I’m not! I love my scars…

LEO BUSCAGLIA QUOTES

ON LOVE

A loving relationship is one in which the loved one is free to be himself — to laugh with me, but never at me; to cry with me, but never because of me; to love life, to love himself, to love being loved. Such a relationship is based upon freedom and can never grow in a jealous heart.

In discussing love, it would be well to consider the following premises;

One cannot give what he does not possess. Too give love you must possess love.
One cannot teach what he does not understand. To teach love, you must comprehend love.One cannot know what he does not study. To study love, you must live in love.
One cannot appreciate what he does not recognize. To recognize love you must be receptive to love.
One cannot have doubt about that which he wishes to trust. To trust loveyou must be convinced of love.
One cannot admit what he does not yield to. To yield to love you must be vulnerable tolove.
One cannot live what he does not dedicate himself to. To dedicate yourself to love you must be forever growing in love.

Love is life. And if you miss love, you miss life.

Never idealize others. They will never live up to your expectations.

Only the weak are cruel. Gentleness can only be expected from the strong.

There are those who will dismiss love as a naïve and romantic construct of our culture. Others will wax poetic and tell you that “love is all,”love is the bird call and the glint in a young girl’s eyes on a summer night.” Some will be dogmatic and tell you emphatically that “God is Love.” And some, according to their own experience, will tell us, “Love is a strong emotional attachment to another…”etc. In some cases you will find that people have never thought of questioning love, much less defining it, and object violently even to the suggestion that they think about it. To them love is not to be pondered, it is simply to be experienced. It is true to some degree all of these statements are correct, but to assume that any one is best or all there is to love, is rather simple. So each man lives love in his limited fashion and does not seem to relate the resultant confusion and loneliness to this lack of knowledge about love.

Joy is always an integral part of loving. There is joy in every act of life, no matter how menial or repetitive. To work in love is to work in joy. To live in love is to live in joy… Why not choose joy?… Why not live in joy?

Love is always open arms. If you close your arms about love you will find that you are left holding only yourself.

The person who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing, is nothing, and becomes nothing. He may avoid suffering and sorrow, but he simply cannot learn and feel and change and grow and love.

The lover must often say, “I love because I must, because I will it. I love for myself, not for others. I love for the joy it gives me – and incedentally, only – for that joy it gives to others. If they reinforce me it will be good. If they do not, it also will be good, for I will to love.

I will love you no matter what.
I will love you if you slip or fall on your face,
If you do the wrong thing,
If you make mistakes,
If you behave like a human.
I will love you no matter.

As soon as the love relationship does not lead me to me, as soon as I in a love relationship do not lead another person to himself, this love, even if it seems to be the most secure and ecstatic attachment I have ever experienced, is not true love. For real love is dedicated to continual becoming.

I have learned that love is the most powerful force available to us. When we have real love we have the strength to perform miracles.

Only when we give joyfully, without hesitation or thought of gain, can we truly know what love means.

Love yourself—accept yourself—forgive yourself—and be good to yourself, because without you the rest of us are without a source of many wonderful things.

One does not fall ‘in’ or ‘out’ of love. One grows in love.

Loving yourself involves the discovery of the true wonder of you; not only the present you, but the many possibilities of you. It involves the continual realization that you are unique, like no other person in the world, that life is, or should be, the discovery, the development and the sharing of this uniqueness.

A wife says to her husband (or vice versa), “Do you love me?” “Of course,” he replies. “I’ve been married to you for twenty years, haven’t I?” How satisfied would we be if we presented someone with a vintage wine and, asking his opinion of it, he replied, “I’m drinking it, aren’t I?” Love still needs expression between those who share it.

Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.

This loving person is a person who abhors waste–waste of time, waste of human potential. How much time we waste. As if we were going to live forever.

We need not be afraid to touch, to feel, to show emotion. The easiest thing in the world is to be what you are, what you feel. The hardest thing to be is what other people want you to be.

We need others. We need others to love and we need to be loved by them. There is no doubt that without it, we too, like the infant left alone, would cease to grow, cease to develop, choose madness and even death.

Relish love in your old age! Aged love is like aged wine; it becomes more satisfying, more refreshing, more valuable, more appreciated and more intoxicating!

We take love for granted. We assume we are all perfect lovers and all we need do is wait and our love will grow and blossom as readily as a flower in spring. Not so. Love doesn’t grow unless we do. It takes patience, knowledge, experience, determination, and every positive trait we possess. In addition, love is always changing and unless we stay aware and change with it, it eludes us.

A life of love is one of continual growth, where the doors and windows of experience are always open to the wonder and magic that life offers. To love is to risk living fully.

I don’t believe in unconditional love. In fact, I think it’s unwise. My love has had a condition that if ever my love keeps you from you, from your growing, and realizing your personal potential, then I must step aside. No one has the right to stand in the way of another’s joy, development, or unique perceptions.

Find the person who will love you because of your differences and not in spite of them and you have found a lover for life.

He must also know evil, hate and bigotry as real phenomena, but he must see love as the greater force. He must not doubt this even for a moment or he is lost. His only salvation is to dedicate himself to love, in the same fashion as Gandhi did to militant nonviolence, as Socrates to truth, as Jesus did to love and as More did to integrity. Only then will he have the strength to combat the forces of doubt, confusion and contradiction. He can depend upon no on or no thing for reinforcement and assurance but himself.

It’s not enough to have lived. We should be determined to live for something. May I suggest that it be creating joy for others, sharing what we have for the betterment of personkind, bringing hope to the lost and love to the lonely.

A total immersion in life offers the best classroom for learning to love.

The easiest thing in the world is to be you. The most difficult thing to be is what other people want you to be. Don’t let them put you in that position.

But man has other needs as well: emotional needs. These, too, are few, but every bit as important as his physical requirements, yet not so simple. If they aren’t met, they can be as devastating as physical hunger, as uncomfortable as a lack of shelter, as incapacitating as thirst. The frustration, isolation and anxiety brought about by unmet emotional needs can, like physical privation, produce death or a degree of living death – neurosis and psychosis.

ON ABILITY

Our talents are the gift that God gives to us… What we make of our talents is our gift back to God.

We are all born with God-given, unique traits and skills. But, as with all possibilities they will remain unrealized unless they are developed, nurtured, and put into practice. You may have the “capacity” to love, but if left undeveloped, you will never gain the “ability.”

ON CHOICE

What we call the secret of happiness is no more a secret than our willingness to choose life.

He must understand that if he is the world’s finest plum and someone he loves does not like plums, he has the choice of becoming a banana. But he must be warned that if he chooses to become a banana, he will be a second rate banana. But he can always be the best plum.

Knowing that one is always capable of change, the second step lies in making the decision to change. Change does not occur by merely willing it anymore than behavior changes simply through insight

I believe that you control your destiny, that you can be what you want to be. You can also stop and say, No, I won’t do it, I won’t behave his way anymore. I’m lonely and I need people around me, maybe I have to change my methods of behaving and then you do it.

ON COURAGE

Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, it only saps today of its joy.

The person who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing, is nothing, and becomes nothing. He may avoid suffering and sorrow, but he simply cannot learn and feel and change and grow and love and live.

There are two big forces at work, external and internal. We have very little control over external forces such as tornadoes, earthquakes, floods, disasters, illness and pain. What really matters is the internal force. How do I respond to those disasters? Over that I have complete control.